Book Review

Landon Carter and his fellow eighteenth-century Tidewater grandee William Byrd both famously left exhaustive and strikingly candid diaries that historians have long exploited. But these documents hardly speak for themselves, because their writers inhabited a mental world profoundly alien to our own. Rhys Isaac probes and interprets Carter's journals to reveal the attitudes and values of the Virginia gentry and the collapse of the established social order that attended the Colonies' rebellion against Britain. Isaac—who in his first book, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, inventively adopted anthropological methods and approaches to examine the social, cultural, and political impact of evangelical Christianity on the colony—is a sensitive guide to Carter's world, and reading his systematic exploration is the only way for the layman to comprehend the diaries properly. He convincingly portrays Carter, one of Virginia's twelve richest men, as a figure ensnared by contradictions: In his energetic defense of American liberty, Carter appreciated that he was helping to destroy a hierarchical world to which he was intensely attached and which gave him enormous power and prestige. And just as he challenged the King's rule, so he found his slaves and his children defying his patriarchal authority and tearing the ties of dependence and obligation that bound them to him. In his diaries he's often furious and blustering—and invariably lacking in self-awareness—as he tries to reconcile one self-image as a stern patriarch and master with another as a caring, sentimental father and protector of the weak and dependent (the book reveals slavery to be a paradoxical institution—a paternalistic system built on the ever present threat of unlimited violence). Alas, though, the vagueness, pomposity, and self-consciously literary style that marred The Transformation of Virginia often render this book puzzling and highly annoying ("To be the historian who will present Landon Carter as a storyteller witness to the revolutions of his times is to be the scriptwriter and theater director of a major historical stage show. I shall introduce myself also ... I came into the world as one of identical twins, the first-born to kind and wise parents who never had much property but lived off their stock of learning as professional scientists")—and not infrequently threaten to make it unreadable.

From Atlantic Unbound:

Interviews: "Inheriting Slavery" (February 26, 1998)
An Atlantic Unbound interview with Edward Ball, the author of Slaves in the Family, in which he sets out to reckon with the legacy of his ancestors' plantations.

Interviews: "A Reader's Revenge" (October 2, 2002)
B. R. Myers, the author of A Reader's Manifesto, argues that the time has come for readers to stand up to the literary establishment.

"A Reader's Manifesto" (July/August 2001)
An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose. By B. R. Myers

Hatchet Jobs,by Dale Peck (New Press). In these essays Peck rightly eviscerates contemporary "bombastic and befuddled" literary novelists who have defined and adhere to "a tradition that has grown increasingly esoteric and exclusionary, falsely intellectual and alienating to the mass of readers." He excoriates the McSweeney's crowd and "the ridiculous dithering of John Barth ... [and] the reductive cardboard constructions of Donald Barthelme," and would excise from the modern canon "nearly all of Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo," and—while he's at it—"the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses ... the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of late Nabokov." He correctly maintains that in writing "for one another rather than some more or less common reader," these writers have created a situation in which "the members of the educated bourgeoisie ... are sick and tired of feeling like they've somehow failed the modern novel." In his meticulous attention to diction, his savage wit, his exact and rollicking prose, his fierce devotion to stylistic and intellectual precision, and—of course—his disdain for pseudo-intellectual flatulence, Peck is Mencken's heir (although he's got to curb his lazy use of expletives). He writes that this collection marks the end of his hatchet jobs. For the sake of the republic of letters, he'd better change his mind.

Western Americana and
Native American History

The North American Prairie, by Stephen R. Jones and Ruth Carol Cushman (Peterson Field Guides/Houghton Mifflin). This book, replete with evocative photographs and informative maps, is a detailed and exceptionally well written guide to the wildlife, topography, and natural and human history of the Great Plains—an area that was once a sea of grass stretching from Ohio to Montana and from Texas to Alberta. The authors have been highly selective; they've chosen only forty-eight preserves in fifteen states and three Canadian provinces, which they consider the best examples of native prairie accessible to the public. "Accessible" is a relative term; many of the places are especially remote in this, the loneliest region of the country. Bring the book along on a car trip out west this summer; get off the freeways and drive, say, Highway 3 across the Oklahoma Panhandle to see the light change abruptly from the soft, hazy glow of the East to the brilliance of the West; or Highway 20, past the Oglala National Grassland (site of the Northern Cheyennes' last battle) and through the Sandhills of western Nebraska as they undulate toward the Rockies; or Highway 12 through isolated Lemmon, South Dakota, to buck the unceasing wind in the Cedar River National Grasslands. Also pack the University of Nebraska Press's The Definitive Journals of Lewis & Clark; Francis Parkman's Oregon Trail; Mari Sandoz's Crazy Horse; Kathleen Norris's Dakota, her sublime meditation on Lemmon and the northern plains; and The Crow Indians, by Robert H. Lowie (Nebraska). This reissue of a classic ethnographical study is based on the fieldwork and interviews with Crow elders Lowie conducted from 1907 to 1931. A twentieth-century anthropologist summoning a vanished nineteenth-century world of war parties and buffalo hunts, Lowie illuminated religious beliefs, relations between the sexes, and attitudes toward death and violence. And he proved a clear-eyed but generous observer; despite its occasional misinterpretations, this is perhaps the most well-rounded contemporary (or nearly so) account of traditional American Indian life on the Great Plains. It's especially enlightening because so much of our understanding of Plains Indians derives from the experience of the Sioux; this study examines their sworn enemy. It's a worthy addition to its publisher's list, which contains the most important collection of books on western and American Indian history.

War Under Heaven, by Gregory Evans Dowd (Johns Hopkins). The Plains Indians dominate the popular imagination, but the most creative books on the history of Native Americans—from the epics of Francis Parkman (still the greatest literary artist among American historians) to the more recent works of Francis Jennings and Richard White—have focused on economic and cultural relations, diplomacy, and warfare among the eastern and midwestern Indian tribes and the British, French, and Americans. Dowd's account of Pontiac's War examines the nearly three-year intertribal uprising, begun in 1763, against the British—a conflict ranging over what is now Pennsylvania to Arkansas, Wisconsin to South Carolina. Shifting from councils at frontier outposts to deliberations at Whitehall, Dowd elucidates the contradictions in British policy toward Indian sovereignty that helped ignite the conflict (contradictions, he convincingly argues, that continued to define and confound relations between the United States and Native American tribes). His explication of both sides' strategies and tactics in this ferocious struggle (the British used smallpox as a biological weapon against the Delaware; the Indians used terror against settlers to disrupt the British forces' supply lines) is both sober and gripping. And, in perhaps his most original contribution, he skillfully uses the perforce meager evidence to analyze the religious dimension of the Indians' resistance. A stylish writer with a talent for compression, Dowd engages and advances scholarly debates while making the lines of those debates clear to the general reader. His book (the paperback edition has just been released) is the best account of its subject. Dowd shows how cunning British diplomacy exploited divisions among the tribes to stem the uprising, but the contest for the lands from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi wasn't really decided until the United States crushed Tecumseh's pan-tribal uprising in 1813. Readers wanting to put Pontiac's War in its widest context should pair this elegant book with White's sweeping The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815.

European History

Yet again we're bombarded with military history: this season three trade publishers have each issued a heralded title on the First World War. The one written by the best-known, best-selling author and published by the most prestigious house—Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?, by David Fromkin (Knopf)—is easily the weakest. Still, although Fromkin conducted no archival research, he's fairly well acquainted with the historiography of his subject (the diplomatic maneuvering and the military preparations directly preceding the conflict), and he therefore avoids the worst flaws that plague popular history. Furthermore, his case, though written in purplish prose, is largely correct. Fromkin asserts (contrary to a version of events promulgated by Barbara Tuchman, in Guns of August, and still tenaciously adhered to by some high school teachers and many political scientists committed to using history to bolster their preconceived notions of international crisis management) that the war's outbreak in 1914 wasn't a colossal accident but, rather, the immediate result of German and Austro-Hungarian provocation. And although for decades scholars have widely accepted this view (the book is hardly the "dramatic reassessment" its publisher promises), it has failed to penetrate the popular imagination, so it's a case in need of wider dissemination. But this book is thin and crude—it reads far more like a lawyer's brief than a historical exegesis. And because his simplistic approach is so unanalytical, Fromkin overstates and underargues his thesis.

In 2001 the Oxford historian Hew Strachan published To Arms, the first volume of his projected scholarly three-volume study of the war—a work that promises to be the definitive general history for a generation, and one that will judiciously and exhaustively explore nearly every aspect of the conflict, from finance to ideology to diplomacy to armaments. Sadly, The First World War,by Hew Strachan (Viking), isn't a one-volume summary of that yet to be completed work but, rather, is based on Strachan's ten-program documentary on the war for British television. It suffers from its genesis. Strachan writes vigorously, but whereas in To Arms he deftly married acute analysis with a magisterial narrative, here he regularly gets bogged down in his storytelling, which renders the book somewhat bloated and unfocused. Moreover, in an attempt to highlight the global dimensions of this struggle, Strachan devotes considerable attention to the conflict waged in Africa and western Asia, which in a short work serves to underemphasize the war on the Western Front—indisputably the crucial theater.

It's a shame that Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy,by David Stevenson (Basic), by far the best title of this lot (in fact, the best single-volume history of the war ever published), will almost certainly win less attention than the other books. Too often popularizers write shallow history books that, thanks to the cachet and publicity that only a fancy trade publisher can bestow, receive unwarrantedly favorable reviews. But just as often first-rate scholars are seduced by their misplaced ambitions to be Big Thinkers and Important Writers. They stray too far from their area of expertise and engage in pretentiously written, self-important speculation. In contrast Stevenson, a historian at the London School of Economics and the author of both a superb monograph on French war aims and the definitive study of the pre-war arms race, has now written with verve and precision an exceedingly smart, analytical history of a hugely important subject. He manages to assess the most complex and controversial issues—such as pre-war military plans and diplomacy; popular attitudes before and during the struggle; the evolution of war aims; the impact of the war on domestic politics; the relationship among tactics, technology, and strategy; and the economic, diplomatic, political, and social consequences of the peace—with both nuance and bracing authority. His book—long, dense, complex, but brisk and animated by a consistently penetrating and commanding intelligence—contains among the most incisive and levelheaded historical expositions I've encountered. For example, Stevenson's characterization of both the perspicacity and the limitations of British policymakers on the eve of the war ("They were probably justified in their gloomy reading of German ambitions, but they underestimated—like everyone else—the cost of frustrating them") is a commonsensical implicit response to Niall Ferguson's brilliant but wrongheaded 1999 book The Pity of War. Stevenson, like most historians today, believes that Germany and Austria-Hungary provoked "a Balkan war" and accepted "the risk that it would escalate into a European one" (an interpretation more intricate and more accurate than Fromkin's). But he sees the war as a tragedy—a word almost always grossly misused, though Stevenson applies it with exactitude: all the powers willingly entered a general conflict because they saw the alternatives as worse. And one of Stevenson's greatest accomplishments is to make clear why the citizens and leaders of Britain, France, and Germany chose four years of unprecedented slaughter over capitulation or any conceivable negotiated resolution.

How the British army grappled with that obscenely costly stalemate on the Western Front is the subject of The Killing Ground, by Tim Travers (Pen & Sword), originally published in 1987, long out of print, and recently reissued in a paperback edition—which is marvelous news, because this is among the most creative works of military history of the past quarter century, and was for years an exasperatingly expensive and hard to find title. Travers explores how Britain's high command confronted, and failed to confront, a war that refused to resemble its preordained structure, and how the military adapted, and failed to adapt, its ideas, tactics, ethos, and organization to what he calls "the internal logic hidden within weapons such as machine-guns and tanks." Scholarship examining British military leadership in the Great War has too often been divided between those who condemn the high command as unimaginative and even criminally negligent "donkeys" and those who defend it. Travers goes beyond such facile judgments to show why it was so difficult psychologically and institutionally to overcome considered and intelligent, if erroneous, ideas and to adjust to radically changing circumstances and technologies (I've long thought this study of organizational innovation and the factors that frustrate it should find its way into the curricula of schools of management). Travers sheds light on subjects seemingly far removed from the Western Front, including Britain's pre- and post- war social structure and the cultural impact of war, by elucidating how the military's accommodation to the full ramifications of new technologies would have demanded wide-reaching and uncontrollable changes in the country's social hierarchy (a development that began to unfold only in the Second World War, when Orwell discerned it and prophesied its consequences in Lion and the Unicorn).

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.